Jim Acosta, CNN’s White House Correspondent, was in McAllen, Texas today with the President’s party, there to meet with Border Patrol people and get a look at the border. Usually preferring to lecture the President rather than report the news, Acosta today made an effort (unwittingly) to be helpful. There’s a video linked at Breitbart

Acosta:I found some steel slats down on the border. But I don’t see anything resembling a national emergency situation.. at least not in the McAllen TX area of the border where Trump will be today.

Terminology makes all the difference. A Wall is bad, Must be demonized, “Immoral”, evil, not who we Americans are, no $5 billion, not one cent, etc, etc, etc. Steel slats, on the other hand, you can see right through, and they are not forbidding at all. All is peaceful in McAllen. Why would they need a wall? Why do we enjoy it so much when Leftys make fools of themselves? I think it’s called shadenfreude:

pleasure derived by someone from another person’s misfortune. synonyms:

ADDENDUM: Jim Acosta undoubtedly has the safest job at CNN right now. If they fired him for making the president look good, they would be admitting that they are, as an organization, attempting to destroy the president on a daily basis, and they can’t admit that.

A Trump-appointed judge has ruled that the President has to give Jim Acosta his White House press pass back, and based his ruling on an only partly-related due process precedent instead of plain common sense. That’s apparently a lawyer thing, to search for precedent first. I object, but I don’t count either. My precedent goes back to the First Amendment’s statement that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of the press. When the First Amendment was ratified in 1791, “the press” referred to the printing press. There were no reporters and there was certainly no press gaggle. In larger towns there was a town crier, and the amendment said that printers could print whatever they chose without government approval or interference. I am clearly not a lawyer, but the Constitution was devised to protect the people from an overbearing government, not the other way around.

There was no White House, the White house was built between 1792 and 1800. So I would contend that the term “the press” doesn’t include reporters at all. The first “press conference” occurred during Woodrow Wilson’s presidency by accident. He apparently said some things to reporters which were then printed, and he liked that and decided to do it again. “Press Conferences” have been different for different presidents since then, with each president deciding how to handle them. And different presidents had different relationships with the press as well– friendly, or not so much.

Rolling Stone 8/04/14: “The White House Distrusts the Media, Reporters Feel Persecuted – a former Obama Spokesman on the history of the toxic relationship” (The wonderful illustration by Victor Juhaz accompanied this article)

The removal of Jim Acosta’s Press Credential has become a very big deal for the Democrats, they have turned it into a “talking point” which they hope to use to denigrate President Trump, of course. That CNN’s Acosta behaved very badly indeed in trying to hijack a Presidential Press Conference was a disgrace. Still chafing from the suggestion that the press was not truthful and “the enemy of the people” he wanted to disagree with the President because he called the migrant caravan an “invasion,” so he took it upon himself to argue with the President and tell him that he was wrong, while hogging the press conference and the ability to ask questions. Extraordinarily rude.

Reporters are there to ask questions of the President, and get him to clarify his answers, but not to take control of the press conference. Acosta, having had his turn, refused to turn the microphone to a White House Intern, assigned to pass it on to another reporter waiting for his turn. He didn’t choose to give it up, and there’s disagreement over whether or not he shoved her, or just yanked the microphone away. Obviously a matter of earthshaking political concern. Mr. Acosta, if he cared to investigate the opinions of many Americans, might be astonished to learn that a vast majority of the public are concerned about the extremely partisan reporting by the media, and angry about it.